We are pleased to welcome the author and ex-journalist Tom Davies as a contributor to Cambria Politico.
Yet another mad dog of the video age, Anders Behring Breivik, was hauled up into the public dock in Oslo for the first time this week and I can’t quite decide who I despise the most: this wretch who took 77 lives or the world’s media gathered there recording his every word and look.
When you look at Breivik’s life you see a man who planned his attack meticulously over years and one who was plainly relying on the publicity generated by his attack to give him a world platform for his ideas. And didn’t it work like a dream! “Gruesome but necessary,” he said of what he had done.
The last thing he did before his attack was to send out e-mails listing his ideas and, within hours of that attack, all these dopey ideas on such as political correctness and Islam were being run at nose-bleeding length even by so-called respectable papers like The Observer. They’re still examining his ideas in column after column in papers everywhere as if they have some intrinsic worth just because he mercilessly gunned down all those poor kids.
This tragedy takes us right to the heart of modern terrorism: the filthy relationship which has grown up between terrorism and the media. They have both become the truly fatal lovers of our lost and falling world: the media with its addiction to all forms of violence and the terrorist with his ruthless and even intelligent exploitation of that addiction. It is all beyond the wildest fantasies of Shakespeare. Both sides hate one another and yet are locked in a lethal, sado-masochistic embrace which they cannot get out of and, in so doing, are both dragging the world spiralling down into their stained and incestuous beds.
If you have a cause to promote forget about stupid words and get yourself a bomb or a gun. Give me a celebrity murder, preferably of a sexual nature, and I’ll reward you with eternal fame.
The media will shout and scream about these charges. They almost always do. But maybe that’s as it should be. The greater the truth, the greater the rage.
gan Tom Davies – follow me on facebook
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